Why, hello, homophobia. I was beginning to worry you’d forgotten about me.

Empress of Dorsa Update:

Words today: -210 <– this is a good thing, since I’m in the editing process and trying to reduce the word count!

Manuscript total: 247,576

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I arrived at school Monday morning at 6:45am to find that the door to my classroom was standing wide open.

That can’t be good, I thought. Perhaps the guy who ran Saturday School over the weekend had accidentally left my door open?

I stepped inside and looked around. Everything appeared to be in order. No Chromebooks missing from the Chromebook cart. All the fish still in the aquarium. Desks and chairs where they should be. And I’d taken my work laptop home over the weekend, so it was in my backpack, unharmed. I shrugged, closed the door behind me, and got started with my day.

At some point shortly thereafter, I heard the voices of custodians just outside my room. Doing something. Pushing on my door.

Must have been them who opened it, I guessed. Maybe the door had needed fixing…?

A few minutes later, at 7:00am sharp, my principal called me.

“Are you at school?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What’s up?” Aha! So she’s going to ask me to cover V’s second period class while the sixth graders are at camp after all. Cool, I can do that.

“There was some vandalism on your door over the weekend,” she said. “So you might see some white smudges on it while the custodians clean it up.”

“Oh, okay.” I said that explained a lot, then told her I’d had a dream the night before where I’d played basketball with one of the coaches against the high school teachers instead of remembering that I had classes to teach, and she’d texted me and I had been in big trouble. We shared a laugh and I let her go.

I’m not going to say, “I thought nothing more about it,” because I did.

When LT called on her own way to school, I told her about the vandalism.

“I keep wondering why vandalize MY door,” I said.

“Because you’re close to the front of the school,” she said.

“Yeah, but so are a lot of other classrooms. So why mine? Was it specific to ME?”

“Eh, you’re overthinking it,” LT said.

But I had a bad feeling.

Later in the day, just before my prep period, my vice principal called my classroom. “Can I borrow X student from your class?” he asked, then added, “Oh, and also, swing by my office when your prep starts.”

“There’s no easy way to tell you this,” the VP said when I went to his office after class. “And frankly, it’s very ugly and hurtful and I hate that I’m having to tell you this at all.”

Yep, I thought, here it comes.

He held up a photo on his cell phone. A photo of my classroom door.

F*** YOU GAY BITCH it said, big and bold and taking up as much of the surface as the graffiti writer could manage.

(It wasn’t written in capital letters. In fact, it was all lowercase except the G in Gay. That’s true; I am capital G gay. But I wrote it in capitals here to try to convey its size and vitriol. And I’m doing that instead of sharing the actual photo, which I’m not sharing because this is the internet, and things live forever on the internet and wind up all sorts of places. One day, the thirteen year-old who wrote it might regret what he did, and I don’t want the photograph of his work existing for all eternity.)

I sighed. Because, yeah. That was what I’d figured.

“I’m so sorry this happened,” he said.

I shrugged. “I hate to sound cynical, but I’m not really surprised.”

And I wasn’t. I knew this was the consequence of not hiding who I am with my kids. I knew this would come my way sooner or later. I told my principal the same thing later.

My VP asked who I thought might have written it, and I told him my gut feeling, the one kid who immediately sprang to mind, the one who, despite my best efforts, just plain didn’t like me and never had.

“I don’t want to throw around accusations without any evidence,” I added quickly, holding up a hand. “But he’s the only one I can think of who both hates me that much and seems like he would actually be capable of doing something like this.”

I tried to think of someone else it could be, to give my VP another possibility rather than fixating on one kid perhaps prematurely. So I flipped through my mental rolodex of my other 80 or 90 students, thinking about the ones labeled “troublemakers,” and realizing I didn’t really have “trouble” with any of my “troublemakers.” I have some class clowns, sure. I have another kid coping with the sudden (and violent) death of a relative that I’d had to write up a couple of times, but he can’t manage to stay mad at me for more than about 45 minutes at a time. I briefly contemplated another name, a kid some of my colleagues struggle with, but I didn’t say the name out-loud, because I’m good with that kid and I think he’s good with me. I couldn’t imagine him doing that.

“Yeah,” I told my VP. “I’m trying to think of someone else who might do something like that, and I’m just coming up blank.”

“What about high school kids?” my VP asked, knowing that I’d done my student teaching at the high school on our campus in 2019. “Because this is pretty ballsy for middle school.”

It is? I wondered. Because, let’s be honest, wasn’t it during middle school that most of us experienced the greatest cruelty we’d ever face in our lives?

“The kids I worked with all graduated,” I said. “The only high schoolers I see these days are the track kids, and I have a great relationship with all of them.”

So we went back to the name I’d said to begin with. We compared handwriting samples.

“Look at this y,” my VP said. “It’s an exact match. If we could just find something with a capital G — see how unique that G is?”

The campus security lady came over to compare the photo of my door to our handwriting samples. “And look at the ‘h’ in ‘bitch’ and the ‘h’ here. They’re both almost like a lowercase ‘n.'”

“[VP],” I said, glancing between them with a grin, “this is very CSI up in here. I’m kind of impressed.”

“Oh,” he said with a shrug. “We do this kind of thing all the time.”

I held it together. I was calm, cool, and professional.

I really was.

LT wasn’t; she was furious. My principal wasn’t. She was close to tears when we talked about it on the phone later that day.

My good friend at work was furious, too. She told me she was wearing her favorite rainbow cardigan every day in solidarity until they caught the kid who did it.

But I wasn’t furious. Disappointed and sad, yes. Hurt a little, yes. Not angry, though, that’s just not me.

However, something happened that I didn’t expect and couldn’t control:

My amygdala hijacked me.

Our amygdala is one of the oldest parts of our brain, our “lizard brain” that evolved with one purpose in mind: Keep us alive. It is the amygdala that controls fight or flight, the amygdala that controls fear. And our prefrontal cortex, the sophisticated part of our brain that developed much later in human evolution that controls things like logical thinking and self-regulation, well, the prefrontal cortex just isn’t as strong as the amygdala sometimes.

For the rest of the week, it was as though I had double-vision. As sincerely unsurprised and not terribly bothered as my prefrontal cortex was, my amygdala had been triggered. It remembered every cruelty I’d ever suffered thanks to homophobia, from the time I’d been harassed outside a nightclub with my girlfriend to the time a restaurant had refused to serve us to every subtle look, laugh, and underhanded insult that I couldn’t *quite* be certain was homophobic or just plain mean.

My prefrontal cortex was understanding. My amygdala was not.

My lizard brain tied my stomach in knots each morning, picked unnecessary fights with LT, tried to make me lose my breakfast on the way to work. My prefrontal cortex was able to assert its dominance as soon as my classroom filled with its first batch of children, kicking me into teacher mode and grammar Nazi each school day.

Until the children emptied out after my last class and my prep period began. Then my lizard brain came back, chanting, like a mantra in the back of my mind, f-you gay bitch f-you gay bitch f-you gay bitch f-you gay bitch.

“Stop it,” my prefrontal cortex chided. “He’s a kid, just an angry kid with an authority problem. Who knows what his home life is like. This isn’t as personal as it seems; it’s just a convenient way for him to lash out.”

But my lizard brain wasn’t interested. It just shrugged and went back to chanting. Went back to threatening to empty the contents of my stomach.

I knew it was all about brain chemistry, so I skipped boxing and went for a long walk by myself on Wednesday.

Sunlight and solitude. It was a good decision; since our lizard brain is old, soothing it not with logic but with something equally old in human evolution — trees, blue sky, and sun — is better for interrupting its skipping record repetition than being inside a boxing gym.

I’d spent the week not saying much to my colleagues about what had happened. A handful knew — besides my principal, my vice principal, and my friend with her rainbow cardigan, I told the math teacher next door, who told another math teacher, and I told my fabulous classroom aide.

But I kept it under my hat with everyone else. I didn’t want them tainted the way I had been tainted. I didn’t want them to have to be angry or cynical or look askance at the kid who did it. I was determined not to let the negativity spread beyond the small circle who’d already had to see it and think about it.

Nevertheless, keeping silent about it was hard, so when one of the history teachers, a fellow boxer, asked me on Thursday morning how boxing had gone, I told her about my long walk, and my turbulent amygdala, and since the photo of my classroom door was the easiest way to explain, I showed it to her.

“That makes me furious,” were the first words out of her mouth.

Yeah, that was why I was glad I’d not shown the photo or talked about what had happened to very many people. I didn’t want a campus of furious teachers, even if they were furious on my behalf.

“I just can’t believe this is still a thing,” she went on. “I mean in 2021! Why is it even still a thing?”

Ah, the innocence of her sentiment.

“It’s still a thing,” I said, shrugging. “At least it is for me.”

I bet this is how black people feel when they explain to their liberal white friends that racism is still a thing. White people watched what happened to George Floyd, and they were furious, and they said, I just can’t believe this is still a thing in 2021. And black people shrugged and thought, It didn’t ever *stop* being a thing.

I think it’s more of a thing in 2021 than it was in 2015. Maybe.

Is it just me, or do you also get the sense that we are devolving rather than evolving?

Naw. Even as I typed that question, I realized I’m wrong. It’s not a matter of devolving; it’s the fact that we never really evolved that much in the first place.

The amygdala is still stronger than the prefrontal cortex. We think we live in a world ruled by the prefrontal cortex, ruled by our incredible human ingenuity, our incredible human brains that create things like cell phones and cancer treatments and rocket ships, but the amygdala is still underneath it all, ready to hijack us. Ready to divide us into our old, tribal us vs. them, ready to make us furious — furious enough to write F*** YOU GAY BITCH (by the way, I really wish he’d used a comma after YOU), but also furious at the one who wrote it.

This morning, I watched a documentary called The Meaning of Hitler, which looks at society’s ongoing fascination with the 20th century’s most notable boogeyman. The filmmakers asked a 94 year-old Czech historian to have the last word on what Hitler really means, and he said something very interesting:

“We are herd animals, and because we are herd animals, we will come together and fight and kill anyone who threatens our herd. But also because we are herd animals who have to live with one another, we have evolved to have empathy, compassion, love. The two sides of human nature, always at war with one another. So Hitler, Nazism didn’t come about because it is anomalous to human nature; it came about because that is exactly who we are. That is exactly normal for human nature, and THAT is what we need to learn about the meaning of Hitler.”

(go see the documentary on Hulu for the exact quote)

Yeah, we live in a divisive, polarizing time. But we’re wrong if we say “homophobia/racism/anti-semitism has gotten worse” — *I’m* wrong if I think things are worse now than in the pre-Trump era. Yes, social media and its hate-mongering demagogues might be shaping the kind of cultural milieu in which a 13 year-old feels entitled enough to scrawl F*** YOU GAY BITCH on his least favorite teacher’s door, but it only works because we are still, at root, herd animals whose lizard brains are ultimately more powerful than our prefrontal cortexes.

The kid was suspended by Thursday.

It was exactly who I thought it was, the kid I’d thought of even before I knew what the graffiti said. Between the handwriting samples and five of his friends (three of which I have in my classes) confessing that he’d told them about what he’d done, my VP felt he had enough evidence to pin it on him.

The kid denied everything. My VP said that’s common with him.

And I should take a moment here to note that my principal, vice principal, the colleagues who knew about it, and even my small charter’s superintendent have been one-thousand percent awesome and supportive. Despite my rather cynical attitude in the paragraphs above, I should note that as a sign of definite progress. Had this happened in the 1990s when I was growing up, or had it happened in the southeast where I come from instead of in the south of California, I’m sure I would have had a totally different experience in terms of professional support.

“There’s a lot we can teach him,” my VP told me in a text message. “A lot we can help him with. But he’s not going to learn anything from us until he can first learn to take responsibility for his actions. He’s not there yet. Hopefully he will be before he leaves us.”

“And we’re moving him out of your class,” my VP added.

“Oh,” I said, surprised.

It’s that last part I’m left to wrestle with, because I was prepared to continue teaching him once he came back from his suspension. I was prepared to demonstrate to him that I wasn’t going to treat him any differently — I wouldn’t treat him as someone who intimidated me; I wouldn’t treat him as someone I disliked. I would care for him, because as a teacher that’s my job — to care for whatever children end up in my classroom, to maintain the same agenda of teaching them, both academically and socially, no matter who they are or what they do.

Having him moved out of my classroom? Well, it makes me feel like I lost somehow.

On the other hand, for the particular class I had him in, his only other option is a male teacher, and perhaps a male teacher is what he needs right now.

“I hate that so much!” said my work friend, she of the rainbow cardigan. “The whole ‘he’ll do better with a male teacher.’ Bull! Young men need to learn that they may have women for bosses one day, and those women will tell them what to do, and they need to learn to respect that.”

Yes. I agree with her. But I was also thinking about what my VP said: He’s not there yet.

I would be a liar if I claimed there is no part of me that is glad he is out of my classroom, out of my life. There is a part of me that’s quite glad. Glad I will only see him occasionally, in passing.

That same part of me thinks it’s probably better for both of us that he’s gone — better for him to have a male teacher, to be in a class without his buddies in it. Better for me because: Could I have *truly* lived up to my ideals of continuing to treat him like any other kid? I am, at the end of the day, human. A human whose lizard brain is ultimately more powerful than my prefrontal cortex.

Still, more of me wishes he would stay in my class than go. I wanted to at least have the chance to live up to my better angels. And maybe, if I had been able to do so, he would have discovered his own better angels, too.

“And,” as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. would say, “so it goes.”

My first fully in-your-face experience with homophobia as a teacher, but surely not my last.